Civilization, in every generation, must be defended from barbarians.
The barbarians outside the gate, the barbarians inside the gate, and the barbarian in the mirror...

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Screw The GOP

Unless they change in a pretty serious way between now and November. I found this to be an excellent post on the theme.

excerpt:

I didn't come to Washington 30 years ago to help Me, Too Republicans further the Liberal Democrats' Leviathan state; I came to help put it back in the cage that is the Constitution, traditionally understood.

So, with national security issues, Roberts and Alito on the Supreme Court, the 2001 tax cuts and welfare reform of 1996 excepted, having this GOP majority for the past dozen years has accomplished very little. Given how the GOP congressional leadership avoids genuine congressional oversight of the federal bureaucracy and is terror-stricken by the prospect of actually engaging in sustained and determined political hand-to-hand combat with the Democrats, odds are even these accomplishments are anything but permanent.

In short, what the GOP majority has done is waste a unique historical opportunity - one that voters might not ever grant them again.

Second, there is the congressional and national GOP's bad faith with conservatives for lo these many years as they've frittered away their opportunity. John N. Mitchell, Nixon's first Attorney General, reassured worried liberals that Nixon's conservative campaign rhetoric of 1968 was nothing more than talk.

"Watch what we do, not what we say," Mitchell cooed in a pattern that has been evident ever since, with only the Reagan years being an exception (and even then not always). This is why the GOP Establishment loves the conservatives voter on Election Day but the day after always forgets the promises made to get us to the polls.

Conservatives end up getting lots of smoke and mirrors talk, but little genuine accomplishment. The GOP wants our money, our energy and our votes, but then they expect us to sit down and shut up until the next election while they perpetuate Big Government.

Put simply, the GOP has been giving conservatives the idiot's treatment since 1968.

UPDATE II: What is to be Done?

Bruce and Paul assume that the key point of what I advocate is having conservatives stay at home on election day this year. It is never so simple as that. I am at least partially responsible for this misconception since I've not previously gone into any detail on what I think conservatives should do. I've focused instead on describing why conservatives are upset and assessing the response to date of the White House and Hill GOP.

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About Me

Former commie and angry hedonist, now a conservative Catholic Republican. After Scientific Materialism, Deism, and Buddhism, I stumbled across the 2,000-year-old Big Kahuna, the Roman Catholic Church. A couple of years before I became Catholic, exposure to the real world had replaced my Berkeley-induced leftism with a sort of sneering "I'm above it all" irony. After becoming Catholic in 1996, I turned conservative, and also became a much nicer guy. Eternal Optimism had won out over Radical Bitterness. Politics, current events, religion, and philosophy, that's what's on the blog.